BigBen

The round one is a spice grinder, right? Despite looking horribly like something else? . . . 😱

It was a huge surprise to me when Ricky Martin came out of the closet, too; but that was because I never knew he was in, lol!

Is anyone else here old enough to remember Hymie the robot on Get Smart and Julie Newmar in My Living Doll?

Stravinsky's music started to make a lot more sense to me, once I saw my ex-lover dance Petrouchka. Suddenly, it became clear what the composer was driving at. A friend of mine once made the point that a lot of dissonant music of the twentieth century was popularized by the makers of cartoons. For example, Disney included A Night on Bald Mountain in his movie Fantasia. I think the combination of the visuals with the music helps the dissonance sneak past our defenses—it worked on me, in any case! 😄

When I was a kid, we had the RCA Victor LP of Byron Janis and I forget which orchestra. I would play it over and over, partly because it was one of the few discs we owned at that time, and partly because it was a gorgeous performance. I'll have to look up a recording by Horowitz and see what I think. He is often a bit too dry and technical for my taste, though I admire his virtuosity. But my heart belongs to Rubinstein and Argerich, because of the passion of their playing.

This is just too coercive to be fun anymore. Kevin is being violated, step by step. Not my kind of story, I guess.

Unfortunately, the story is listed as being on temporary hold, which makes me fear the worst. I hope the author is okay, because the other incomplete story of his is also on temporary hold. They are both very promising stories, so I fervently hope we'll see more chapters eventually.

I used to have a friend whose parents' condo was on the 95th floor. It was a bit scary, if you worried about getting caught in a fire. My friend's mother worked for the State of New York in an office in the World Trade Center. As I recall, she said it took her twenty minutes just to get from the lobby to the floor where her office was found. It was a significant part of her commute. (Given her age, she was long-retired before 2001.)

Generating truly random numbers is a challenge. And then, how can you be sure? (Scott Adams made this point in a strip many years ago, in which Dilbert is visiting the demons of accounting and they pass by a demon generating random numbers. Lots of nines, as I recall, and as the demon says to Dilbert, "How can we tell?"). And yet, as Heisenberg observed, sometimes science has to progress one death at a time. It wasn't until all the medical authorities who drove Semmelweis into the asylum had died that hand-washing between procedures became standard medical practice. People laughed at Lemaître for proposing what later came to be called the "Big Bang" theory. I believe it was Fred Hoyle who first called it that, in ridicule. I believe part of the initial resistance to the Big Bang came from fears that the notion was too similar to the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo. (The fact that Lemaître was a Catholic priest didn't help, despite the fact that his observations were irrefutable.) Now it's standard cosmology, the steady-state universe is refuted, and you can watch a debate on YouTube in which a prominent atheist uses the Big Bang to support the notion that there is no God. I resisted the notion of the Higgs Field for many years, because it sounded far too much like the luminiferous aether that was debunked by Maxwell. Given that people are now re-examining the possible role of leeches in healing, can it be too long before someone takes another look at the notion of phlogiston?

If they are both hot and fall in love, that would be the kind of surprise I'd enjoy! 😄👍

I'm sorry, but I just can't see how the direction my birthplace was facing out into the universe at the moment I was born can have any effect on me. And why the moment I was born? Shouldn't the moment of conception be the determinant? Since the entire solar system is rushing through space at a staggering velocity, this means that even if the earth is facing generally toward the same constellation every twelve months, the actual direction in which it is pointing is different. It's just that the stars in these constellations are so far away that our motion in relation to them is not noticeable to the naked eye. Astrology takes for granted the old terracentric view that the earth is flat, and the stars are fixed to a dome arching above.

Definitely a serious lack of imagination going on there.

Nice twist at the end. If Tom pushed Steve overboard, who would ever know? Jodie's remark gave me the impression he might have been slowly eliminating the bad guys, but looking back, I see that one died of a collision, which would have been hard to arrange. Though I enjoy the amiguity. One point of confusion, though: is it Mark or Michael Beckett?

Those temperatures sound more like New York or New England than Texas. Stay as warm as you can. I hope things warm up soon!

Obviously he was using a sonic screwdriver! 😄

All beings that have awareness are sentient. The earth has plenty of sentient life. The question is whether it has any sapient life, and there I agree with the crack about social media, lol!

Revising published work is always tricky. Artists are not always the best judges of their own works. Composers sometimes do this (*cough* Tchaikovsky *cough*), and then performers keep going back and digging up the earlier versions and performing them, instead of the composer's updated, "mature" version. The author of a story I really like just pulled the first edition of it from every Web site where it used to be available. He is now in the process of replacing it with a second edition. This second edition is not an improvement, in my view. The first edition, for all its flaws, was written in the heat of inspiration and had a charm and immediacy about it that the revision, I am sad to say, lacks. Not only that, but we often see cases where the constraints of producing a work for publication can result in better art, as witness all the battles between painters and their patrons that resulted in masterpieces. A literary example of this is when Robert Heinlein was forced to cut thousands of words from Stranger in a Strange Land before the editor would accept the manuscript for publication. Heinlein carried a grudge against that editor till his death. Virginia Heinlein eventually published the unedited draft, I guess as a form of posthumous revenge on Robert's behalf. I have read both, and the edited-down version is the objectively better one. Far from destroying the work, as Heinlein believed, the cuts made it tauter and more energetic. If I wrote a story back in the days when VHS and Blockbuster were a thing, does it lose anything by being from the time when it was written? How important is topicality to the point the story is trying to make? Or would editing out all the topical references make the story more timeless? How important to what I was trying to say is keeping the story topical? Is bringing a story up to date going to illuminate the issues any differently from how I first wrote it? Might it actually work better as a period piece? How does it change our reading experience if Zelda drives a Pierce-Arrow, as opposed to a current-model BMW? What is the value, if any, of knowing the make and model of her car in the first place? Should it have been mentioned at all? On the other hand, would Sunset Boulevard even be the same film if Gloria Swanson's car had been anything other than an Isotta-Fraschini? If I ever get up the courage to commit some of the stories buzzing in my head to electrons and pixels—and assuming I will live long enough afterward to even have regrets looking back at those stories in the first place—I hope I'll remember to ponder some of these questions before I make any hasty changes. I suppose the examples to emulate are Bach and Händel, who never hesitated to reuse a theme they liked, but who always found ways of keeping things fresh and interesting.

I love Tom Scott! I'd love to marry him, except he is probably not gay. (Since all the really cute ones are either married or heterosexual . . . [sigh].) He has a wonderful rant on programming to handle time zones, by the way.

Don't know if anyone has posted this, the Piano Concerto No. 3, by Rachmaninoff, played by Argerich and conducted by Chailly. The recording is from 1982. If any woman could capture my heart, it would be the beautiful and redoubtable Madame Argerich. She is a firecracker of a musician, worthy to be ranked with (and perhaps above) Rubenstein and Horowitz.

It just occurred to me that there are several YouTube channels devoted to mathematics and related subjects. Matt Parker is a British math teacher, whose channel is called, I believe, Stand-up Maths. Tom Scott, another Brit, covers all sorts of topics, including mathematics. He has a number of channels, so just search on his name. The big-time guy is Brady Heron, an Australian who got his start by doing videos for various departments at the University of Nottingham. Can't remember the name of his maths channel, but search on Periodic Table of Elements (chemistry department, and starring Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff), and you'll find a listing of all Brady's other channels as well (he does one in conjunction with the Royal Society that is just fascinating). These guys are all friends, so if you find one of them, you are likely to find the others quite easily. Please forgive a veer off topic, but if you are interested in physics, start with Brady's channel and branch out from there. Destin Sandler, another friend of Brady's, is an American ballistics engineer with wide-ranging interests in all sorts of topics related to physics and mathematics. And of course, there is always SciShow!

Like that toilet paper commercial on television years ago, when they would roll out a roll of their brand and a roll of Brand X, to show how much more you got from them. Even if the writers were clueless you could tell from the smirk in the voice-over artist's voice that she knew what she was saying when she delivered the immortal line, "That's a lot of sheet!"

You don't really know Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon!

Q. Why was six afraid? A. Because seven ate nine. I'm a fan of the numbers seventy and above in French. The names become odd to English ears, as seventy is literally called "sixty-ten", and so on from "sixty-eleven" up to "sixty-nineteen", followed by "four-twenties" for eighty. They continue on the same way, all the way up to "four-twenty-nineteen" (99). It took a lot of drill to become automatic when counting, but now it really tickles my fancy.

Hey! No mocking the hairstyles of my youth!

There was a revised version of Forever I, here on GA. I started reading it, wasn't sure I liked it (I tend to get stuck on the version I encounter first), so didn't get past Chapter 2. I imagine these first nine chapters are from the revised version. I read Neil Gaiman's article, "George R. R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch," and I take his point, but I really do wish Mr. Schaeffer would spend his time writing new chapters, rather than revising what's already there. . . (sigh) . . . 🙂